11. Félix Buhot
(1847-1898)
Un Grain à Trouville (A Storm at Trouville)

(click on image to print)
Buhot, Un Grain à Trouville

Un Grain à Trouville (A Storm at Trouville)

Etching and drypoint (?), 1874, B/G 122 i/vii, 162 x 243 mm. Very fine impression on thin, brownish chine or japan, appliquéd to a slightly larger sheet of thick wove paper, with good margins (the platemark very much flattened); some dust in the margins. The state is before any aquatint or other rework and before the borderlines were completed and strengthened and exactly matches the first state in the André Fontaine collection, illustrated in his book on Buhot. Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) was one of the painters much admired by Buhot, and one can see strong resemblances in the paintings of the two. Boudin, however, made only two prints, a lithograph of sailors and an etched harbor scene of sailing boats, neither of them close to the kinds of images for which he was famous. Buhot’s Grain à Trouville, though a Boudin subject, is not a copy of any Boudin image; it is Buhot’s own composition, and he was probably as familiar with the beach at Trouville as Boudin was. It nevertheless is a sort of tribute to the older man, and one might legitimately describe it as the best print Boudin never made. The plate signature, by the way, is Buhot’s early anagrammatic one, “Tohub,” something Burty talked him out of soon after. Early states of this print are rare.